Bad Cree

That might be the worst thing about death: it doesn't stop anything. The world keeps moving, even though the pain is just as real as the day it settled in.

I worry that this place, the solitude of my life in this apartment, in this city, has turned my memories monstrous. That loneliness can make once-beautiful things terrifying.

It feels bad to be loved this much when you don't think you deserve it.

We had her forever and only a minute. She was alive, full, present, and then she shapeshifted into nothing. There was no measure of time that made it make sense.

There was something about the absence of sound and the acute feeling that I was really, truly alone that left me on edge. Maybe my body wasn't at home in quiet. Maybe it needed the rumble and movement of voices and people.

I have so much love I'm sick with it. But there will always be bad living alongside it, etched under my skin. Living with bad doesn't make me bad, though, it's just there like everything else.

The worst part about missing someone is when you forget for a second that they're gone. When you remember, the pain hits you harder than before. Forgetting can feel like a gift, but a lot of the time it's just hurt lying in wait.

On cloudless days I swear the prairies are closer to the sun than anywhere else in the world. Not because of the heat. It's the size of the floating orb when nothing else is around it. Beating like a heart in a blue, blue ocean.

The only thing worse than the moments after death have got to eb these one: the moments before.

How cruel that we can't even hurt in peace, that we have no time to try to heal. We can't even grieve without something coming for us.

I want this embrace to mean everything between us is forgiven, that the years of heartbreak can be healed. But for all a body can do, it can't dam a river that runs too wide.

Time seems to slow, memories of places collide with what I see now, like I'm living in the past and the future all at once.

Being by the lake is different from being by the ocean. The ocean announces itself, the steady sound of waves letting you know it’s near and ready. By the lake, the noise comes from everything around it. Trees rustling in the wind, birds and bugs chirping. The lake itself, though, stays quiet unless big winds or nearby boats disturb the water into lapping the shore. It watches more than it speaks.

Sadness is not so far from anger anyways. It's a flip of a switch. A trickle of water diverting from one pool to another

One thing they don't tell you about when someone you love dies because of a sickness is that death happens in a million different ways in the lead up to the actual moment.

We all sit in silence of this realization for a moment: that we've hidden ourselves from the only other people who could understand.

I think about all these secrets we've all been holding tight to our chests like a bad hand of cards, trying to bluff our way out of losing it all. How did all of these dreams lie between us?

It's the bad that has been passed down and passed down and passed down, that weaves itself in the marrow of our bones. A bad inflicted on us, one we have no business carrying. And we're all just coping with it in the ways we know how.

An Indian dying is like a balsam fir getting chopped down. Trees for mile and miles feel the pain under the soil. They send their reserve nutrients through the root network to the stump, which closes over with bark like a scab. Eventually, the stump turns into a nursery, a home for new growth, for something else to take shape. This isn't the same as healing or being reborn, but it's the closest we'll ever get.

I know what it's like to be made into something, to not be sure if the hole in me was always there or if it was carved out over the years.

But sometimes, laughter is less about what's funny and more about letting someone know you understand, that you're in on the joke together.

Wapanewask," she said once, pointing at the ground to a yellow stalk sprouting tiny, white flowers growing in a plume. "Your mom's favorite. Fitting. Yarrow is stubborn, like her. Only grows where it wants, doesn't take orders from anybody.

One thing they don’t tell you about when someone you love dies because of a sickness is that death happens in a million different ways in the lead-up to the actual moment.

It’s the bad that has been passed down and passed down and passed down, that weaves itself into the marrow of our bones. A bad inflicted on us, one we have no business carrying. But it’s heavy. And we’re all just coping with it in the ways we know how.

JESSICA JOHNS is a nehiyaw-English-Irish auntie and member of Sucker Creek First Nation in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta. She is an interdisciplinary artist and award-winning writer.

Your body carries home just as much as the land.

But another reason, one deeper than the rest, is so I don't have to feel the guilt anymore. So the regret of closing a door between the living and the dead stops eating at me like it does.

I wonder what’s worse, living in the deep marrow of grief or pretending the person you’re grieving never existed in the first place.

How far away from her was I that she could look so small when all my life she had been a mountain?